Turning Back the Clock to 1994 With Zac Posen

Do you remember what you were like in 1994?

I was really a kid growing up in New York City. I would have been 15. I was at a summer camp for a musical theater. I’d be wearing an Old Navy or Gap pocket tee at the time. I was also wearing vintage high-waisted sailor trousers. And then I wore these pretty outrageous John Fluevog lime-green crazy platform shoes. I had really long, curly hair. I remember that after high school, I would take the train in and try to time it to catch Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow walking down Mercer Street. When I went to high school, I went to school with kids who were the muses of culture of this time: Harmony Korine, Chloë. That was a moment in New York. The skater boys would sit on St. Mark’s cube. That was my first kind of introduction to fashion. I was transitioning into the idea of making clothing, which was an important time for me. I was definitely asking who I was. I was way innocent, way nerdy, and finding my identity.

Fashion-wise in ’94, you have John Galliano turning up the heat in fashion; you have Karl Lagerfeld making his most beautiful collections, getting really elegant and romantic in reaction to Galliano; you have McQueen hot and angry and bothered and furious and ferocious, coming on and bringing this in-your-face messaging and questioning ideals of beauty that were happening.

I made my first real fashion piece that I wore, and I remember buying the fabric with my mom in rural Pennsylvania, in Bucks County, where we had a teeny farmhouse. We sewed a floor-length, fake-fur, black-and-white coat that I tramped around in in New York and on the subway. It was the moment where I understood the power of fashion, because it became a conversation piece of self-expression on my subway car, and it started to get pickup. It’s also the first time, as this very, very young adult, that I began to get attention because of this coat, and because of the way I looked. I was wearing eyeliner and eye shadow at the time. It was a form of interaction with New York City as a community.

There was a sense of a better time, a romance, a changing time, a loss of innocence. How do you bring out this longing? I understand why these kids and teenagers and this new audience are so enthralled and excited about all these incredible carpenter jeans, incredible crop tops, and nostalgic logos.

Do you have a memento that you keep from the past?

I have all my school and camp T-shirts that are just personal. From a material-object standpoint, I just relinquished all of it, which is great. It’s good to keep a small box. I think it’s also a nice thing to let it go. I definitely have little remnants of my party frocks I was making for my girlfriends in ’94 and ’95. I’ve got my magazines. Print and publications were at a level of excellence and such a high degree in terms of storytelling. Our artists and writers, filmmakers, technicians, and costume designers in Hollywood were really valued. I hear it from the kids that there is an understanding and appreciation right now in culture for that time, as we are moving into such a virtual, digitally dependent, unhuman world.

This collection we’ve been talking about gives us the option to try time travel a little bit. If you could travel to any time period, where would you go?

I’m really happy where I am today.

Wow.

I’m an Imagineer, though. I would really be interested to go very Proustian and see Paris specifically, in La Belle Époque. I probably would have loved the mid-to-late ’70s as a young adult. Those are my people who work with me pretty well. You can ask Pat Cleveland and that whole generation; it’s simpatico.